Autographer: the latest incarnation of the SenseCam

The SenseCam, a wearable automatic camera invented by Lyndsay Williams when she was at MSR Cambridge, was a big factor in MyLifeBits and helped us form many of the insights for Your Life, Uploaded. It made its commerical debut as the Vicon Revue with very few changes to its design and targeted at memory loss patients. Now OMG has updated its look and function for consumers and released it as the Autographer.

Like the original SenseCam, it has a fixed-focus, fish-eye lens to capture your experience without worrying much about where it is pointed. The autographers has these sensors: 

• a light level sensor, so that when you change scene, such as walking through a doorway, it can take a picture of the new room
• a passive infrared sensor so that person (a warm body) can trigger a picture
• an accelerometer, so that when it jiggles it can avoid taking a blurry picture (and motion can indicate photo opportunities)
• magnetomorer: detects changes in direction, like a compass does
• temperature: temperature can signal a change worth snapping a picture (and enables a record of your environment)
• GPS: to record your location

Pictures are taken with a 5 megapixel low light sensor, which hopefully makes it much better at indoor photography than the old SenseCam. It has 8GB or storage, bluetooth and both desktop and smartphone apps to handle all the pictures and sensor values.